Miller's Salem Witch Trial tale was initially aimed at reds-under-the-beds, commie-hating 50s McCarthyism in the US but has since taken on totemic status for all those who hold individual freedoms dear. This used to be the preserve of "youth" idealistic, iconoclastic, angry and hungry for freedom and change. These notions were the fuel for youth culture, rock and roll and generations of revolutionary politics where nothing was off-limits. It was two-fingers-to-the-man punk rock. But social media has changed all that. We are now truly through the looking glass and live in a world where young Insta-people are actively closing down lines of thought and attempting to crush free speech while wrinkly old duffers man (person?) the barricades to defend their freedoms.

To wit, JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and almost 150 other artists and writers pointing out in an open letter to Harpers, our freedom of speech, so long taken for granted, is under threat like never before from exactly this Salem-like group think.

But of course this time it's online.

Miller's stark message was that truth is no longer an absolute it is simply whatever a big enough and menacing enough crowd say it is.

Ringing any social media warning bells?

It should be.

But here's the weird thing.

This time we can't blame some iron-fist commie government or a tin-pot dictator this time we are doing it to ourselves.

Generations who fought for freedom of speech in Britain and the West (to the envy and wonder of the peoples of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol-Pot's Cambodia and on, and on), always feared a Big Brother figure could at any moment take it away.

We feared an over-powerful, overzealous state could (and would given half a chance) crush our hard-won human rights and introduce the Orwellian group think so brilliantly captured in his classic novel 1984.

But, as I say, we were wrong.

We have in fact become our own Big Brother.

Try being an individual online, try saying something different, something interesting, something off-beat, which sways from the party line.

And see how far you get before the millennial PC lynch mob sniffs blood.

Challenging group think has been the job of artists throughout history people who see life at a tilt, people who open our eyes to other ways of perceiving and engaging with the world.

Their ideas trigger debate and challenge the orthodoxy and bigger freedoms and change ensues.

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It's hard to imagine feminism, say, without the loud, courageous voices of Misses Pankhurst, de Beauvoir and Greer hard to imagine the vital sexual and gender revolution these women helped inspire by challenging the existing group think that said women were for cooking, drudgery and making babies and definitely not voting.

Yet it is exactly people like this who are now under attack from the loud aggressive army of online sheep who launch violent attacks on those they disagree with while self-aggrandising with easy slogans, cheap memes, and hive mind thinking.

US Journalist Anne Applebaum, one of the signatories to the Harpers' letter, warned "Twitter mobs" on the left and right sides of the political agenda (along with US President Donald Trump) were placing "very important restraints on freedom of speech".

The decidedly mature signatories' letter bravely states: We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter speech from all quarters.

It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

At the same time, we have the phenomenon of social media panics and Twitter mobs that seek to silence people who veer from one orthodoxy or another. These are both very important restraints on freedoms of speech and also on people's sense of risk aversion.

There are a lot of writers, artists and journalists who are afraid of approaching certain subjects, afraid of crossing lines or even lacking sufficient zeal for particular subjects because they're afraid of their peers.

They are frightening words.

We live in an age where being offended has become a virtue.

Where being faintly irritated by somebody else's ideas mean those ideas must be silenced.

And, thanks to the Salem-like mentality of the online lynch mobs they truly are.

Three decades ago brave, outspoken men and women like Peter Tatchell were smashing through homophobic group think which said being gay and lesbian was wrong and immoral.

Tatchell helped change the world for the better but one wonders how he would have coped if social media had existed and he had been hounded, closed down and threatened with extreme violence in the same way JK Rowling has.

We live in #dangerous times.

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Big Brother would be proud of how millennials are crushing freedom of speech COMMENT - Express